Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Vietnam! I had a wonderful Christmas. First, I ended my China/Vietnam tour. Since the tour was over, I changed hotels to stay in a nice, fancy hotel so I could have a bit of luxury on Christmas day. I believe only about 10% of the population in Vietnam is Christian so they don’t celebrate it much, but there were lots of cute trees placed all around town. I think this is my "official" Christmas card for 2011!

I was really sad to be away from my family for Christmas day, in fact I had been dreading it for weeks. It is my first ever Christmas away from them, and it’s definitely not the same. I was lucky enough to get to talk to them all in the afternoon though, which definitely made me smile! A few wonderful girls from my tour were staying in Hanoi for the day, so I spent my day with Cassie from the UK and Angela from Australia. We spent time wandering around shopping, definitely my idea of a perfect activity! We ate turkey sandwiches for lunch, in the spirit of the holiday. Then we went to the most amazing ice cream shop for desert. All in all, a lovely Christmas day. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas as well!

Good Morning Vietnam

Hello again! I apologize for the long time since my last post. I procrastinated in writing my Vietnam post, assuming I would write it during my first few days in China. What I didn’t realize is that China would block my blog! I knew they blocked facebook and youtube and a few other sites, but it never occurred to me that blogs would be inaccessible as well. Guess it’s not the end of the world but I felt like a complete slacker! I think I would struggle quite a bit if I lived in China though – not being able to access all the information is frustrating to me.

So back to Vietnam…it seems so long ago now that I’m finally posting this. (the picture above is a cave we visited in Halong Bay.) Vietnam was great. We left part of our group in Siem Reap, which was quite sad. The good part, however, is that we had 11 new people join us in Vietnam. It’s always fun to have new personalities to change the dynamics a bit. Our first night we went out on boats to the Mekong Delta. They offered us snake for dinner – yes, actual snake – and I ate it! The craziest part was that they offered to let one of the people in our group kill the snake before dinner. I could never do that, but one guy did. In fact, after he killed it, they put some of it’s blood in a shot of local whiskey and the guy drank it’s blood. Yes, he killed the snake and drank it’s blood! If that doesn’t strike you as insane, I don’t know what does. It's supposed to be an honor and bring you good luck, but it seems over the line to me. In totally unrelated snake news, please meet my new boyfriend Frank!

On our way back to Ho Chi Minh City, we stopped at the Cu Chi tunnels. We were able to get down in the tunnels and crawl through them like they did in the Vietnam war, and let me tell you, you definitely couldn’t do it if you were claustrophobic. I kept thinking about how small they were and how people spent months down there, then we were told that they had actually been widened from their original size so that tourists could fit in them – great. We watched some of the propaganda movies that they used to show during the war, and some of them were pretty harsh against the Americans. I think my favorite line of all was “Due to a crazy batch of American Devils….” I didn’t sense any hostility the whole time I was there, but you could tell there used to be such strong feelings between the two countries. I did one other thing at the Cu Chi tunnels that I never thought I would do in my life – I shot a M60 machine gun! You could buy bullets for $1 each, so I bought 10 just to see what it was like. They go so fast, it was over in 2 seconds, but I’m glad I got to try it. Not like the crazy, snake killing guy who shot off 200 rounds!

We visited a couple of wonderful towns in Vietnam. We visited Nha Trang, a wonderful beach town. We spent the day on a boat, went snorkeling and just relaxed. We had some amazing food for dinner – I even had quesadillas! I can’t tell you how much I’m missing Mexican food. And cheese. And Italian food. And…sorry, got off topic for a second there! I did manage to go to a chocolate buffet in Hanoi thoughJ We also visited Hoi An and had some clothes custom made. I swore I wasn’t going to have anything, but of course ended up walking out with 2 skirts, 2 pairs of pants and 1 dress. Oops! I’ve already destroyed both pairs of pants, but for the small price I paid, I was okay with that. One girl even had her wedding dress custom made for $300. Everything there was so cheap!  In one city we were supposed to go to a war museum, but the power was out and it was closed, so instead our wonderful tour manager Jonny suggested we go to the zoo instead. Here is my friend Simba with the biggest smile of all time.

The final stop on the tour was Hanoi. One of the weirdest things we did there was visit Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. It is the most serious place I’ve been on my whole trip. You can’t bring ANYTHING in with you – no camera, no purse, no hats, no sunglasses, nothing. You are walk inside in a straight, single file line. You are not allowed to talk. You’re not allowed to stop. You’re not allowed to put your hands in your pockets. You just march straight ahead, view the waxy, preserved body of a man who has been dead for over 30 years, and then leave immediately. Some people come from all over the country to pay their respects.  It’s such an odd custom!

To show you some of the variety of transportation we used in Southeast Asia, here is a picture of me and Tony from the US in our cyclos. They are bikes with two wheels in the front and one in the back. A guy sits on the bike seat and does all the pedaling while we got to sit in the front and get pushed around. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me!

For our final night we spent the night in Halong Bay. We had a private boat for the 30 of us, so obviously it was quite large. We spent 2 days sailing between the massive rock formations jutting out of the water. In the afternoon of the first day we went kayaking around some of them and it was just brilliant – you went into small coves with only one entrance, where the ceiling was just barely above your head. There was nobody else around so you could just relax and enjoy the beauty of the “Natural Wonder of the World”. The only mistake I made was sharing a kayak with Dwayne, a 19 year old from Australia. Everyone liked to tease him, so of course, at the end of the kayaking they decided to tip over his kayak…with me in it! We tumbled in the water fully dressed – jerks! Since I was already wet, I joined in the water fun, jumping off the top of the boat and just messing around. That evening we had a pirate party aboard our boat. I dressed in head to toe white, as an heiress who had been kidnapped – too bad I had Stockholm syndrome and liked all of the pirates:-) Halong bay was the wonderful end to an amazing time in Vietnam!